Section 8

8. D. (12) Soul belongs, then, to another Nature: What
is this? Is
it something which, while distinct from body, still belongs
to it, for
example a harmony or accord?

The Pythagorean school holds this view thinking that the soul
is, with some difference, comparable to the accord in the
strings of a
lyre. When the lyre is strung a certain condition is
produced upon the
strings, and this is known as accord: in the same way our body is
formed of distinct constituents brought together, and the blend
produces at once life and that soul which is the condition existing
upon the bodily total.

That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length.
The soul is a prior [to body], the accord is a secondary to the
lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of
body it could not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is
not. That due blending [or accord] of the corporeal materials which
constitute our frame would be simply health. Each separate
part of the
body, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a
distinct soul [its own accord or note], so that there would be many
souls to each person. Weightiest of all; before this soul there
would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the
case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who
produces the
accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on
which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human bodies could
put themselves in tune.

Briefly, the soulless is treated as ensouled, the unordered
becomes orderly by accident, and instead of order being due to soul,
soul itself owes its substantial existence to order- which is
self-caused. Neither in the sphere of the partial, nor in that of
Wholes could this be true. The soul, therefore, is not a harmony or
accord.